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Source: FT Chinese
OpenAI’s Sam Altman is dealing with an unpredictable force that threatens his ambition to turn the startup into a trillion-dollar business: Elon Musk.
Since Donald Trump was elected President in November, executives of ChatGPT developers have been preparing for the incoming U.S. government — a process that has changed as Musk becomes a key adviser to the president-electMore complicated.
OpenAI has been one of Musk’s rivals, trying to predict how the billionaire will take advantage of his new strengths in Washington, from pushing for new regulations targeting the company to impacting the award of lucrative government contracts that couldIt will promote the development of Musk’s own artificial intelligence startup xAI.
“I am very firm in believing that Elon will make the right choice. If someone has a huge political power like Elon and uses that power toIt would be extremely unconforming to the American spirit to hurt competitors and benefit your own business.”
Trump himself has said that Musk would put national interests above corporate interests, while Musk said on his social media platform X that competitors expect him to be magnanimous is “right”.
“No one would believe this,” said a lawyer who once caused Musk’s anger.
Since co-founding OpenAI in 2015, Musk’s relationship with Altman has broken down.The Tesla boss called Altman “the cunning Sam” and filed a lawsuit against him and OpenAI, accusing them of being “deceptive as much as Shakespeare’s drama” while seeking to cancel it with Microsoft.) Billions of dollars worth of business partnerships.
According to Chris Lehane, director of policy at OpenAI, Musk is “unique.”Lehan is a political veteran who has helped companies such as Airbnb and Coinbase exchanges cope with complex regulatory barriers.He added that OpenAI’s approach is to “control what we can control.”
According to Lehan, the company emphasized its importance to the Trump agenda in three ways: to enhance U.S. competitiveness, especially against China, to rebuild the economy and strengthen national security.Altman also donated $1 million in personal funds to Trump’s inauguration fund.
“At the end of the day, every American, both inside and outside the government, wants to put American interests first. This administration talked about the need for victory in the US-led AI during the campaign and afterwards.You want something like that to happen, and OpenAI has to be involved.”
OpenAI has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence companies since its launch in November 2022.Currently, it is adjusting its structure, partly to attract more external investment to stay ahead of the pack — and Musk’s lawsuit claims the move betrays OpenAI’s original intention.
OpenAI fought back in a blog post Friday, claiming Musk himself pushed for a similar structure when he was co-chair in 2017.The company said Musk “should compete in the market, not in court.”
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, Microsoft’s board member and OpenAI’s biggest supporter, said he was “really worried” that Musk’s hostility to Altman would be in Trump’s artificial intelligenceIt is reflected in the policy.
“Obviously, people with integrity and character will say, ‘Look, since I’m involved in these lawsuits and so on, I should be distanced from the operation of the government in these matters,'” Hoffman said.
He added that if Musk blurs his personal views and larger geopolitical rules and structures, this “foreshadows potentially dangerous shortsightedness and dangerous conflicts of interest”.
People close to Musk said Musk has his own principles and will not use his new role to impose heavy regulation on OpenAI.Given that his role as co-chair of the newly formed U.S. “Government Efficiency Division” is to find ways to cut regulation, it doesn’t make sense to do so.
“You’re going to see a lot of red tape being cut,” said a person who invested in Musk and Altman.”OpenAI will have a simplified process to quickly get up and run their data centers. This will work equally for all competitors,” they added.
However, according to investors in a Musk-owned company, Musk can leverage his central position in the incoming administration to drive the development of xAI.”The U.S. government is the largest employer in the United States. As Musk’s customer network expands, will the government become a major customer of xAI?” the person said.
Hoffman, a former OpenAI board member, speculated that Musk may use his position to slow down the development of xAI competitors.
“If you try to make one company superior to others when you execute government policies, you can do all of these things,” he said, adding that doing so is “frankly very destructive. It’s harmful to the industry,It is also harmful to American society.”
At present, the biggest challenge facing OpenAI from Musk is direct competition from xAI, not political influence.
“In Musk’s company, they may have the largest proprietary data set in the world. They have satellite images from Starlink, videos from Tesla cars, and X data. They are seriously studying this issue,” said a once-in-law.said someone who has worked with the two entrepreneurs.
xAI’s latest chatbot Grok-2 was released in August and has been able to compete with similar models from leading tech groups, following Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama.
Earlier this year, Musk began developing a supercomputer called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee.By September, it was launched and used to train the large language model Grok, a competitor to OpenAI’s latest generative AI system, GPT-4.”It took 122 days from start to finish,” Musk wrote on X.
The data center houses more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units, more than any other single AI compute cluster.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in October that “there is only one person in the world who can do this” and called the giant “the fastest supercomputer cluster on Earth.”
A big investor at Musk’s multiple companies including SpaceX and xAI said: “Besides torture Altman, the thing he is most proud of is their speed of launching giants. No one has the same in the field of artificial intelligence.Computing power, this is a big deal, but there are still many things to be determined.”
Although Musk gained new advantages for his proximity to the president-elect, investors say the biggest threat to OpenAI remains his leadership in overlapping businesses, his massive personal wealth and the ruthless work culture instilled in his company..
“Elon was able to achieve things in the real world that no one else could do,” they said.
